3.
THE COURT-APPOINTED PSYCHOLOGIST LOOKS LIKE a rich man gone to seed. Disheveled but aloof. Patrician features, no accent, probably from the Main Line. He has a double chin and broken blood vessels around his nose. A drinker. No wedding ring. He’s taking forever to review Frida’s file. He barely acknowledged her when she arrived, just ushered her to her seat and continued tapping on his phone. Frida expected a woman, doesn’t know if it’s better or worse to be evaluated by a fiftysomething white man. He doesn’t seem like a parent, doesn’t seem like he has a vested interest in child welfare. Then again, neither did the social worker or the men from CPS.
Frida hasn’t spoken to Harriet in six days, hasn’t seen or held her in a week, has been scrolling through photos, rewatching every video, smelling the teddy bear that still holds her scent. She should have taken more videos but had been wary of waving her phone in Harriet’s face. Gust used to say taking photos was stealing someone’s soul, but he has different standards for Susanna, whose 1,498 followers have seen Harriet in just a diaper, Harriet naked from the back, Harriet at the doctor’s office, Harriet in the bath, Harriet on the changing table, Harriet first thing in the morning, groggy and vulnerable. Selfies: Harriet asleep on Susanna’s shoulder, #bliss. Those people know what Harriet ate for breakfast this morning. Frida desperately wants to look, but Renee made her close her social media accounts.
The smell of mothballs is giving her a headache. She hasn’t worn her black suit since her last round of job interviews. She’s wearing extra blush and rosy lipstick, hair in a low bun, her grandmother’s pearls. Disgraceful to wear them here. Her late grandmother’s greatest wish had been for her to get married and have a baby.
On the psychologist’s desk, a palm-size video camera on a tripod is balanced awkwardly on a stack of manila file folders.
“Ms. Liu, before we begin, is English your first language?”
Frida flinches. “I was born here.”
“My mistake.” The psychologist fumbles with the camera. “Ah, here it is.” A red light goes on. He flips his legal pad open to a fresh page, uncaps his fountain pen. They begin with Frida’s family history.
Her parents are retired economics professors. Immigrants. Her father from Guangzhou, her mother from Nanjing. They came to the States in their twenties and met in grad school. Married for forty-four years. Frida was born in Ann Arbor, grew up in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. Their only child. Her family is comfortable now, but her parents came from nothing. Her father was dirt-poor. When she was a child, all her grandparents lived with them at various points. Her aunt too. Then another aunt. Cousins. Her parents supported all the relatives, sponsored their visas.
“Back when that was possible,” she says.
The psychologist nods. “And how do they feel about the incident?”
“I haven’t told them yet.” She looks down at her nails, painted shell pink, the cuticles neatly trimmed and healing. She’s been ignoring their calls. They think she’s busy at work. A full week without speaking to Harriet must feel like torture. But Frida doesn’t want to hear their questions, about Harriet, about anything. Every call begins with the same questions in Mandarin: Have you eaten yet? Are you full? Their way of saying, I love you. This morning, she had coffee and a fig bar. Her stomach is churning. If her parents knew what happened, they’d fly here. Try to fix things. But they can’t see her empty house and the cameras, can’t know that they escaped Communism and a daughter like her is all they get.
The child’s father is white? Were there any cultural issues?
“I think, like all Chinese parents, they wanted me to go to Stanford and meet a nice neurosurgeon. Another ABC—you know, American-born Chinese—but they loved Gust. He got along well with them. They thought he was good for me. They were very upset about our divorce. Everyone was. We had a newborn.”
Only tell them what’s necessary, Renee said. The psychologist doesn’t need to know that until Frida and Gust, there was only one divorce on either side of her family. That it was bad enough to marry a white man, let alone lose him, let alone lose custody of their child.
All the grandparents, she says, have a hard time with the distance. Gust’s parents in Santa Cruz, California, hers in Evanston, watching Harriet grow up over FaceTime and Zoom.
“This country is too big,” she says, recalling her last flight to Chicago, when she had Harriet sit on the tray table, facing the other passengers. The thought of her parents knowing makes her want to take a knife to her cheek, but she doesn’t need to tell them yet. Daughters are allowed to have secrets in this new world.